Optimising Images Using GIMP

To keep your website running light and lean, all images should be optimised before uploading them to your website.

If you have GIMP then continue onto the video guide below.

If you want GIMP, then download it for free here: http://www.gimp.org/

If you have the glorious awesomeness that is Photoshop, you’ll probably want our Optimising Images with Photoshop CS5 article which is available here.

Overview on Optimising Images for Website Use

As a guideline, your images will typically be a maximum of 800 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall, and may be much smaller depending on the size of image you’d like on your webpage (or may be larger if it happens to be destined as a background image)

Unoptimised images can be bad for your website for numerous reasons including:

• Poor user experience.  Large images take a long time to load, and your user/customer will have to wait for the large image to load.
• Slow website.  One large image on a page can slow the whole page loading time, which can be very irritating for users.
• Excessive bandwidth consumption.  Every time a user loads your large image, it takes up bandwidth, which is often a limited monthly supply.  When your bandwidth runs out, your website goes offline.
• SEO impact.  Slow page load times hurt your website’s SEO.

Let’s Get Optimising!

1. Open GIMP
2. In the GIMP menu, go to File -> Open and select your chosen “soon to be optimised into light and lean awesomeness” image
3. Watch the below video for what to do next: